Indian Wars / Palestine (French version), 2003 $3,750
Goat skin, poplar frame, video monitor
48” by 50”

A goat skin rawhide screen covering a video monitor is pictured above.
Rawhide is used as an evocative primative material through which the history of the Palestinian people from 1948-2003 is see in a slide show format.

Winter Count paintings were made by the Plains Indians such as the Cheyenne. Their history paintings on buffalo robes used pictographs representing significant events in lieu of a written language. As these events were recorded in the dead of winter hence they were called Winter Count paintings.

Ringsby has taken this tradition and reworked it combining images from Palestine as he wishes to forge an historical parallel between the histories of these oppressed peoples. Both native peoples were driven off their homelands by settlers who justified their ruthless colonial land grabs with religion. The images used in Ringsby’s Indian Wars/Palestine, 2003 were either sent to him by friends in the peace movement in the Occupied Territories and from the UN.